MURKETING

Murk looks at art

So I couldn’t make it to the “Photographs from the New World” opening at jen bekman the other night. But my trusty avatard Murk Story did make it to the version that popped up in Second Life. (See Murk’s prior (thoroughly lame) “adventures” here and here. Actually on second thought, don’t bother.)

After arriving, I thought I’d take a few steps back and take a picture of the gallery. Unfortunately, it was on the edge of a small cliff, and Murk fell off. What an idiot! It took him longer than it should have to levitate back to the proper place, but he finally did. He was rewarded by having the longest Second Life conversation he’s ever had — with Jen Bekman’s avatar!

Read more

A Turn of Phrase

In Consumed: “Snakes on a plane” (the phrase, not the movie): When a movie promotes the hype more than the hype promotes the movie.

You could make a good case that the great comedy hit of the year was “snakes on a plane.” Not the film (which wasn’t really a comedy, or a hit) but the phrase — or, if you prefer, the phenomenon. There has been a lot of theorizing about this and its implications for, or lessons about, the future of marketing in the postmodern, participatory era and so on, with the inevitable invocation of words like “viral” and “meme.” But really, it was never rocket science to figure out why “snakes on a plane” was popular: It was funny. More to the point, it was funny in specific ways: it was instant, mutable and unmoored….

Continue reading at the NYT Mag site via this no-registration-required link.

Fictionalized “Food Nation”

I’ve been very curious about the adaptation of Eric Schlosser’s nonfiction best-seller Fast Food Nation into a fictionalized version directed by Richard Linklater. In this LA Weekly interview, Linklater says this general idea was Schlosser’s. The film

depicts a burger chain called Mickey’s whose McWhopping cash cow “the Big One” turns out to be riddled with shit. But Mickey’s is less a ringer for McDonald’s than a synecdoche for the fast-food-franchise herd entire, and Fast Food Nation the movie sets its sights not on individual corporate malfeasance so much as a pervasively poisonous socioeconomic order. If a Mickey’s Big One, for all its shiny happy advertising, leaves a trail of exploited workers, abused animals and despoiled land — not to mention unhealthy consumers — there’s an industrial-grade logic behind it. At the heart of the movie is the image of the meat-packing plant’s disassembly line, a conveyor belt whose speed directly correlates with the plant’s profit. Faster means higher margins, more workplace injuries and more irremediable mistakes at the gut table….

The co-writers approach their subject through three storylines that intersect in Cody, Colorado, a fictional meat-packing anytown. Don (Greg Kinnear) is a Mickey’s company man, sent to investigate the source of a “fecal coliform” infection; Sylvia (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is an illegal Mexican immigrant trying to resist the vice of drugs, harassment and injury that constitutes work at the Uniglobe Meat Packing Plant; Amber (Ashley Johnson) is a teenage Mickey’s waitress, experiencing the first stirrings of political consciousness.

It’s an interesting approach. The risk, or at least it seems like a risk to me, is that fictionalizing it makes it all much easier to dismiss. On the other hand, the power of a hit movie still blows away most other platforms I can think of. We’ll see how this one plays out….

Peril & Hygiene

The obits today bring the news of the death (last month!) of Sid Davis, “considered one of the foremost practitioners of the social-hygiene film.” The Times says:

The Sid Davis universe is fraught with peril. Every transgression — a swig from a bottle, a drag on a cigarette — leads to swift and certain doom, usually in under a half-hour. Among the series of unfortunate events to which Mr. Davis’s young protagonists fall victim are these: abduction, murder, rape, stabbing, robbery at gunpoint, falling off a cliff, suffocating in an abandoned refrigerator, being burned to a crisp, being stuffed into the trunk of a car, being run over, pregnancy, venereal disease, unemployment, time in pool halls, time in prison, myriad auto accidents, heroin addiction (a direct result of smoking marijuana), prostitution (ditto) and bad hair (ditto).

I became familiar with some of Davis’s films years ago, through Rick Prelinger, who made a convincing case that it was worth looking at these things as more than just laughable camp — there’s a “secret history” here, as he has put it. He has in the past noted that, viewed a certain way, Davis’s films are “wonderful documents of L.A.’s underside in the fifties.” I wrote a little article about Prelinger’s work as a “media archeologist” back then, and would go to these parties he would have every so often where he’d show a bunch of industrial or educational films from his massive collection, which has since become part of the holdings of the Library of Congress. I continue to admire his work.

The obit mentions “Boys Beware” (in which Davis himself apparently has a cameo as a “predatory” homosexual”) and “Age 13;” these and a bunch of other Davis films can be viewed online here.

Exploding? Inevitable? Plastic?

So according to this USA Today story, Edie Sedgwick is hot hot hot. Evidence? Well there’s the book Edie: Girl On Fire, co-written by David Weisman and Melissa Painter. “Weisman was co-director of the underground cult classic Ciao! Manhattan starring Sedgwick and other Factory celebs,” USA Today notes. Speaking of which, Urban Outfitters is selling Ciao! Manhattan T-shirts. More evidence!

Of course really all of this is just evidence of supply, not demand. Where is the grass-roots side of Edie-mania? “Edie is an online phenom,” USA Today claims. The paper then quotes Ben Allgood, 22, who is identified as “creative director for Edienation.com. He says: “A lot of kids are finding her, and a lot of people are creating online communities.”

No other examples of online communities or phenom-ness are offered. So I went to Edienation.com, which bills itself as “the ultimate insider guide to Edie Sedgwick,” but is basically a promo site for … the book Edie: Girl On Fire. (A quick whois.com check confirms that it’s registered to Weisman.)

I hope Weisman’s PR team got a bonus for this one.

For real?

I was paging through Rolling Stone this morning, and lingered a bit over a where-are-they-now gimmick feature, on various hip hop figures. Among them: Willie D, who was with the Geto Boys when they had the landmark hit, “Mind Playing Tricks on Me.” The Geto Boys, you may recall, were eargly gangsta rappers, with extremely raw raps and a pretty convincing Fifth Ward thug attitude. Anyway, Willie D left the music business a few years ago, took a shot at being a boxer, and today “most of his business concerns revolve around real estate.”

So far, so dull. But here are the specifics: “In 2004, the MC turned entrepreneur made signifcant property investments in the oil-rich republic of Azerbaijan. ‘Azarbaijan ain’t like the USA,’ Willie D says of the country, where he now lives with his wife and children.”

Um, what?

He goes on to say that his new home “took some time getting used to,” for reasons relating to the food and that “you’ll get your ass killed if you talk about the government.” But: “With real estate, it’s all about getting in early.”

Well, I think it’s safe to say he’s gotten in early.

Anyway, some media organization needs to send a writer or a camera crew to Azerbaijan to hang with Willie D. Immediately.

Something to do (November 11)

Sources say:

On November 11, fine artist/street artist Steve Powers, a/k/a ESPO, “will places forty pieces of fine art on the sidewalk of West Broadway in SoHo and sell them himself, first come, first served. …By putting his work on the open market on West Broadway, he is stepping all over the lines between high and low and insider and outsider. The vending law in New York states that vendors must be 20 feet from a place of business. Powers will circumvent this by renting out an unoccupied storefront, which will allow him to operate within the law and accomodate a few hundred guests.”

West Broadway and Prince Streets on Saturday, November 11th. Preview work at www.firstandfifteenth.net on Wednesday, November 8th. Sale starts at 11am. “Cash and all major credit cards accepted.”

Something to do (November 8)

Friend of Murketing Josh Neufeld celebrates the release of The Vagabonds #2: Of Two Minds. It collects his collaborations with (among others) Harvey Pekar, David Greenberger, Nick Flynn, Eileen Myles, R. Walker, and The Beatles. The Beatles? Maybe that particular piece wasn’t exactly a collaboration. Anyway, 17 pieces, 32 pp., brown ink on tinted paper. A very nice package, priced to move at $4.

The party is at Sheep Station — “classy, cozy, has a fireplace and is located just minutes away from the Atlantic Avenue train station/metro hub” in Brooklyn. Josh will be there selling and signing this comic, and other volumes of his, such as Katrina Came Calling and A Few Perfect Hours. Sheep Station: 149 4th Avenue (corner of Douglas). Brooklyn, NY. Wed. Nov. 8, 6:30—8 pm.

High On Grass

In Consumed: Bamboo: How it became the It Material by seeming a little less like itself.

While new-and-improved products are a constant feature of the consumer landscape, it’s still unusual to encounter novelty in the form of raw material. This may help explain the vogue for bamboo. Obviously this fast-growing plant (it’s actually a grass) is not new, either as a living thing or as the basic stuff of fabricated goods. Think, for example, of 1950’s-era tiki décor or, alternatively, centuries of Asian culture. Even so, bamboo has in the past five years or so gradually acquired a whole new level of popularity in the United States and maybe even a mystique.

One reason for this is its peculiar flexibility as a material. That it can serve as the key ingredient of a hard floor or a soft bed sheet makes it sound like some industrial wonder stuff concocted in a conglomerate’s skunk-works program; that it simply grows out of the ground seems even more wondrous — and wondrous in a way that’s a little more resonant with the present consumer zeitgeist….

Continue reading at the NYT Mag site via this no-registration-required link.

Additional links: David Bergman essay on his “transparent green” idea; Treehugger piece on bamboo ethics; The World Bamboo Organization; American Bamboo Society; Bambooclothes.com.

Something to do: Barking Irons live screenprinting

The Barking Irons guys, who you may recall from the Brand Underground article, have something interesting going on: In-store screenprinting at several NYC venues over the next week or so. They’ve built a traveling screen-printing box — that’s it above, pretty cool — and will printing up shirts on the spot. They’ll be making available some of their more popular designs “plus additional accents like bats and ‘the collect’ designs to overlay on top,” Daniel Casarella explains.

They’ll be at Atrium from 12-9 today, Friday November 3. At Saks on the Saturday November 11 from 11-9. And at Barneys Coop (the one in Chelsea) on Saturday November 18 from 11-9. The plan is for the custom shirts to be priced at $75 for a single print and $85 for a double, but those details may vary by store.

Here’s the “menu” they’ll have at each appearance.

Cute!

Vulture Droppings declares: “Cute is the new cocaine.”

And in fact: “The main use for the internet is for downloading cute pictures, mostly of kittens. people do this like it is a drug.”

Correct!

At Murketing HQ we’ve been into the whole cute thing for ages. And I don’t mean the “kawaii” version of cuteness, tarted up with vague allusions to cosmpolitanism. I mean pure, uncut, cute shit: kittens, dogs wearing costumes, and, of course, pandas. This is the stuff that keeps us coming back to Yahoo’s most-emailed page day after day, looking for what’s cute now.

Editorial note: Vulture Droppings links to several YouTube kitten videos, which I assume are cute, but which I didn’t bother to watch. Not bothering to watch YouTube videos is, of course, well on its way to being the new cuteness.

“Hartz-IV Fashion”

An identity-protected reader sent along a link to an article (apparently traslated from German) about a “Berlin cut-price label” called Picaldi. It’s easy to think the European consumer as always being a refined, couture-wearing type, “not saving up their welfare money to buy the knockoff jeans that some tier 3 rapper wore on an album cover,” this reader observes.

But the latter scenario is pretty much what Picaldi is all about. One of its signature products is described in the story as jeans “that are more or less a direct Diesel rip-off,” and apparently quite popular with euro-mooks. So check it out, and get conversant with rappers Bushido and Eko Fresh, and what exactly “Hartz-IV fashion” means. Hartz-IV, I’ll just go ahead and tell you, is “German welfare money,” according to the article.

aNYthing new?

A-Ron’s aNYthing, one of the startups featured in the Brand Underground story that appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine several months ago, is the subject of an article today in The New York Times. There is one new piece of information: He got a cease-and-desist from the New York Giants (since the aNYthing logo uses a very Giants-like “NY”).

That’s not A-Ron in the picture above, but that’s one of the T’s that was in the planning stage when my story came out. It’s now available.

Rising Leif

Josh Spear’s site just had a glowing writeup about artist Leif Parsons: “talented, creative, fresh, and has a great sense of humor … we think the best is yet to come for thoughtful young Parsons.”

Congrats to Parsons. I’m a fan of his work: He’s the illustrator for Consumed. (So, yes, the best must be yet to come …. )

TieLab Updates…

Very pleased to see Murketing Q&A subject TieLab getting some more attention, from Adorn Magazine. Meanwhle, the TieLab has continued to add new designs: Skull + Bones, SquidBrain, and Bombs Away!, for instance.